In depth: How Björk's 'Biophilia' album fuses music with iPad apps

This article was taken from the August 2011
issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in
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Björk Guðmundsdóttir sits perched on the edge of a wooden
armchair in her home recording studio, gazing into the middle
distance. The frisky tones of her as-yet-unfinished song "Virus"
blast from four speakers behind her, all soaring vocals and
shimmering chimes. Usually when a track is playing, she'll drum on
her knees, bop around the room, or stand by the window rhythmically
tapping her toes. But right now, on a cloudless New York spring
afternoon, Björk is completely motionless. She's not thinking about
the music.

Her mind is focused on her to-do list, which she has scrawled in
green ink and pencil across a whitewashed wall to her left.
Thirty-five cryptically worded points -- the last reads "Synopsis
apps" -- mask her new album Biophilia's grand intentions:
to define humanity's relationship with sound and the universe; to
pioneer a musical format that will smash industry conventions; and to make good on an ambition that, at
the age of 45, she has harboured for more than three decades.

When Björk was ten, she would argue with the director of what
was then the Barnamúsikskóli Music School, in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she
studied part time. Not short of chutzpah and frustrated by the
institution's classical approach -- "all this retro, constant
Beethoven and Bach bollocks", as she later described it -- Björk
often sat in the director's office lecturing him on how he should
run the school. More playing and writing, less history and theory;
more emphasis on developing a personal style, less on training for
a symphony orchestra. The school's director appeared to enjoy their
discussions, often calling Björk out of lessons for a debate, but
he stood firm. So she resolved one day to set up her own school,
which would champion the expressive, intuitive aspects of music
over the historical and academic.

Björk left Barnamúsikskóli in 1980 and became sidetracked by
stardom: first with the critically lauded post-punk band the
Sugarcubes and soon after with a solo career, heralded in 1993 by
Debut, an album that went platinum in the US and
established her as a global celebrity. She has sold more than 20
million copies of her six studio albums, which have spawned three
UK Top Ten singles. And she has won a slew of accolades including
four Brit awards, Sweden's prestigious Polar Music Prize, and a
best-actress gong from Cannes for her performance as Selma in Lars
von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. She never built her school
-- but she didn't forget about it, either.

Today, the wide, tree-lined street in New York's Brooklyn
Heights that Björk calls home is a hubbub of television cast and
crew filming the ABC drama Georgetown. Her
280-square-metre penthouse apartment lies atop a muscular 20s
redbrick block on the corner, high above the bustle. "You kind of
feel like it's a country house," Björk says. She is wearing a
cadet-grey dress with shiny mauve patches on the shoulder and
waist. When the sunlight from the studio windows hits them, they
sparkle. The room is airy, with tables for her kit, which includes
a keyboard, speakers, computer and a mix of percussion and
electronic music controlpads. Björk has spent much time here over
the last 36 months working on Biophilia, trying not to
feel daunted by the album's scope.

There was a musicological ambition: she wanted each of the
album's ten songs to emphasise one key idea, such as counterpoint,
arpeggios or tempo. And there's intellectual purpose: each song's
lyrics dwell on a scientific theme that attempts to match its
musical concern. In "Crystalline" Björk invokes crystals as a
symbol of the track's structural complexity; "Virus" is so called
because of its multiplying phrases. "I hope to show kids that if
you base musicology more on structures in nature it's actually
not that complicated," she says. Although "a bit of a maths nerd"
when she was younger, for this album she knew that she would have
to learn more about the sciences if she was to unite them
convincingly with music.

She worked to self-imposed deadlines, reading books and watching
documentaries on everything from astrophysics to
cultural theory, focusing on areas where science and sound
intersect. One major influence was Oliver Sacks's book
Musicophilia, an exploration of the relationship between
music and neurology, to
which the album's title is a nod. Björk undertook more research for
this project than for any of her previous albums. One day she found
herself explaining string theory to friends in a bar. "It was
actually in a pretty cool way," she says, grinning. "Like I was
really good at physics or something."

For all their chewy themes, Björk felt the songs couldn't stand
on their own. "People are getting a lot of music for free by
pirating it," she says. "But they are going to double [the amount
of] shows because they want a 3D,
physical experience." Her instinct, at first, was to provide
that experience through a music house, "like a museum". Each room
would be designated a different song, and contain interactive
exhibits related to the track. The stairs would be working piano
keys. In June 2009 she spoke to National Geographic about
another way she could add to the album: working together on a
40-minute 3D IMAX movie of Biophilia. She approached her
longtime collaborator, French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who agreed to direct. Björk hoped this film and
the music house would not only generate revenue, but also educate
-- finally realising the vision she had described to her teacher,
all those years ago. "This project," she says, "is also my
music-school project."

But, Björk says, the movie "was like pushing three elephants
uphill" conceptually. The difficulty was that the film was based
around her appearing in it. "I kept saying: 'Really sorry, Michel,
it cannot be human scale, this is about sound.'" Gondry also became
tied up for longer than expected directing his film adaptation of
the comicbook The Green Hornet. "You know that Hollywood thing where
they kill the life out of things? They show the movie and count how
many people laugh at the 17th minute, and the director has to
change that or reshoot something." Björk put the film on hold.
Meanwhile, a viable alternative was fast becoming apparent. "We
were always thinking about the iPad, iPad,
iPad."

She had been tracking rumours about Apple's tablet device since
2008, becoming convinced of its potential to liberate her writing.
She composes outdoors by singing to herself, which has its
limitations. "All my songs end up being 83BPM, which is the speed I
walk. People I've worked with have made fun of me because of it,"
she says. "I felt stuck, I was writing most of my songs in
four/four -- verse, chorus, verse, chorus. It's so I can avoid
doing a maths riddle and singing; for me those worlds are
separate." But a portable touchscreen device with the right
software could make it possible to compose intricate pieces without
sacrificing impulse.

Björk commissioned a suite of music programs for her Lemurs --
the touchscreen controllers she used to perform live remixes of
tracks during the 2007-08 tour of her previous album,
Volta. The experience impressed her. "I can just do this
beat here," she says, sliding a blue teacup around in circles on
the little table in front of her to demonstrate. "The algorithm of that
is really complicated, but waves and curves -- these kinds of
shapes are natural for us." As soon as the iPad launched in April last year, she bought one, converted her
music software for the format and eventually used it to part-record
Biophilia. She also began sifting through Apple's App
Store, exploring apps such as Soundrop, a tool that uses lines
drawn on the screen to generate music.

That June, she had an epiphany. "We were trying to make the film
behave like an app, but it wasn't," she says. "I also kept thinking
about the music house -- that's how I wrote these songs. But the
house is, like, rooms -- like the apps."

She reasoned that, through apps, her audience would have the
same interactive and educational experience with the songs that
they would have experienced with the house and film. And, like
those projects, apps would offer premium, non-piratable value.
Björk told Derek Birkett, founder of One Little Indian, the label
to which she has been signed since 1987, of her idea. The next day
she received an email from Birkett, announcing that he had
contacted a selection of the best app developers in the world. "I
was just like: 'What?'" she recalls. "I wouldn't just call somebody
out of the blue. I'm probably a bit shy. Sometimes that's really
scary when he does something like that, but sometimes I'm really
grateful."

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